Employment Bill [Lords]

I want to focus on three issues in the Bill: the minimum wage, the tribunal system and the ASLEF ruling, and the impact of the BNP. A lot has been said about the history of the minimum wage. My hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr. Brown) is leaving, which is sad, because I want to give him another history lesson. More or less everybody now seems proud of the minimum wage and nobody wants to see it done away with. Most people would say that it was one of the finest achievements of the Labour Government in the late 1990s. One of the biggest problems is that we first introduced it in the early 1900s, but it took us 90 years to put it in place. One of the saddest things is that the trade unions themselves opposed the national minimum wage when the union of the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries) proposed at the TUC in 1983 that we should have one. Many trade unions, including, sadly, the National Union of Mineworkers, which I was a member of, voted against that. Thankfully, the Labour party and, eventually, the trade unions saw the error of their ways, and we did something that we should rightly be proud of. I am glad that the majority of hon. Members see that that was the right thing to do, and we should build on that. We should protect those on the minimum wage from rogue employers, and that is rightly built into the Bill. As everyone in the House seems to agree, we should ensure that tips are excluded and that people are paid properly. If a tip is a tip, that is what it is—it is not part of people's wages. We should also protect the minimum wage from people such as the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), who said—I will put my glasses on to read this quote, because that is how seriously I take this—that the"““minimum wage and other labour market regulation has been the last straw for hard pressed low end industries””." That seems to accord with what the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire has just said. I would argue with her—but I think that she has a point—when she says that some employers have made the minimum wage a ceiling, rather than a floor. That is a problem not with the minimum wage, but with rogue employers taking advantage of it, and that is what should be challenged, not the minimum wage itself. I want to focus particularly on the issue of paying people under 21 the rate for the job, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Ms Clark), and I want to use my personal experience. I started work at 15 as a fitter at the National Coal Board. I served a four-year apprenticeship. At 19, I was trained, capable and safe. I was able to look after a coal face, and the men there could have been killed if I did not do my job properly. It would have been absurd for somebody to say, ““You can do the job, but we're not going to pay you the rate for the job for another two years because you're too young.”” We would not do that at the end of somebody's working life, so why should we do it at the beginning if they are capable, safe and properly trained? We should really look at that in some detail, and I ask the Minister to consider it as we make progress with the Bill. Another point that was raised earlier—I am going to put my glasses on again—related to dispute resolution. It is clear that the intent in the Bill is to reduce the amount of regulation and litigation, and I would normally welcome that, but the truth is that where dispute resolution works well and where we have good grievance procedures and good disciplinary procedures, which people know and understand, lay members who probably do not understand such things will have internal protection if they are supported by trade unions or bodies such as the citizens advice bureau. My worry, which has been raised with me by constituents who sit as lay members of tribunals—this has been raised clearly already—is that the proposals are about taking them out of the loop and letting people with a legal background have sole responsibility for deciding cases that they might not be qualified to decide, in the sense that they do not have experience of the workplace from the side of the employer or the employee, even though they will have a legal background. That is a real worry, and we should address it. We should ensure that the proposals that we take forward are not about reducing the number of people with real knowledge and experience who have sat on tribunals for many years, but about doing the job properly. Finally, I want to come on to the problems with clause 18, which have been raised by the TUC. I understand why the Government feel that they have to come into line with the European Court regulations. It appears that everybody thought that that was fair when the Bill went into the Lords, but the Lords clearly did not think that it was, and they have changed the provisions. It is clear from the TUC brief that many of us have received that the TUC has some major problems with the proposals. One of the main things that I worry about is that we will involve the courts. We should be in no doubt that if the BNP thinks that it can have its day in court, it will not care what it costs or about the legitimacy of its case—it will get up and use the courts of this country as a political platform to argue against the things that we believe in, but which it abhors. There is a basic democratic tenet here. Through their own democratic processes, trade unions decide what they believe in. I was proud to be the president of Unison. Through many years of negotiation and democratic debate, the union came forward with a constitution saying that the union supported the rights of gay people, lesbians, black people, disabled people and women. The BNP does not support those rights; it supports the same things that fascists have supported throughout the years—discrediting people, pulling people down, making people feel different and exploiting differences. We should be clear that the BNP is not wanted in the trade union movement and we should work with the TUC and others to ensure that the legislation that we introduce tightens up the expulsion of the BNP. The truth is that we should not even be talking about the legal position on this; the trade unions should be able to set their own rules and say, ““If you're a fascist, we don't want you.””